lectures sponsored by our committee in 2007-2008

November, 2007
 

Professor Leszek Balcerowicz
"Post-Communist Transformation in Central Europe"
 

     Professor Leszek Balcerowicz is a former Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and President of the Polish National Bank. Currently Prof. Balcerowicz is Head of the International Comparative Studies Department, Warsaw School of Economics.

              He is the author of dozens of books, scientific articles, and studies focusing mainly on the comparative analysis of changes affecting various socio-economic systems in the world. Many of them were translated into foreign languages and published in the United States and Europe.

              When working for the Polish Government, he skillfully managed to connect his academic approaches and theories with effective human resource management and implementation of socio-economic reforms. His deep knowledge of economic problems and his exceptionally dynamic and effective work helped him to establish worldwide respect and a reputation as one of the most outstanding politicians and economists in the history of Poland and Eastern Europe.

              His academic work and public sector service would not be so significant without three major achievements that have had a lasting impact on the economic history of Poland:

              First, in the late 1970’s, before the creation of the “Solidarity” movement in Poland, he lead a research team at the Warsaw School of Economics, which, after in-depth studies, prepared scientifically-based findings that any reforms of the crumbling “socialist economy” in Poland were futile. Prof. Balcerowicz and his colleagues concluded that the system could not be “repaired” nor successfully adjusted to the needs of the Polish people.

              His second and most important achievement was the design and execution of the so- called “Balcerowicz Plan.” In this Plan, he addressed two major goals: radical, fast, and effective widening of business freedoms, and the creation of a stable and well performing monetary system.  These freedoms were well used by the Polish economy. The “shock therapy” laid foundations for the creation of over three million new Polish entrepreneurs. Thanks to this reform, in the following years the Polish economy has shown unexpected dynamics.

              It was the beginning of long-term fructiferous activity of Prof. Balcerowicz as a chief economist in three Polish governments. After the application of his “shock therapy,” he was engaged in a long-term daily, difficult, but successful work to bring the Polish economy to the free market system.

              The third great undertaking of Prof. Balcerowicz was his service as President of the Polish National Bank, devoted mainly to maintaining a strong currency, low inflation, and the independence of the fiscal system from political fluctuations. This achievement was recognized by international financial institutions including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and others.

              Through all these efforts and activities, Prof. Balcerowicz kept his continuing focus on one overarching objective: to assure Poland’s return to the modern and dynamic capitalist economy. This attitude and these achievements assured him widespread recognition as one of the most outstanding politicians and economists, with a deep knowledge of Poland’s economic problems and the capability to address them.

By Prof. Vlad M. Kaczynski

 More about Prof. Leszek Balcerowicz

see also : Leszek Balcerowicz  in Seattle, by Dr. Arista Cirtautas, Visiting Lecturer at the UW Jackson School of International Studies
 

lectures sponsored by our committee in 2006-2007

Professor RICHARD DUNN 
 "Joseph Conrad: Supra-National Novelist "
 

Richard Dunn is a Professor and former Chair of the University of Washington English Department, where he has taught fiction and Victorian Literature courses since 1967. He is author or editor of 11 books and numerous articles and reviews, principally on the nineteenth-century English Novel.
Professor Dunn will lecture on how, as English has become a world language in recent decades, many award winning non-native speakers of English have produced award winning fiction. A century earlier Conrad became a British subject, wrote in English, but deliberately crafted his subject matter in expansively "supra-national" ways, even as he was becoming a major "English novelist."
 

April 2007

Dr. Thaddeus Radzilowski is the President and co-founder of the Piast Institute: An Institute for Polish and Polish American Affairs and visiting Research Professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.  He is President Emeritus of Saint Mary’s College of Ave Maria University in Orchard Lake, Michigan.  He is a historian who holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan.   During his career he has taught at Madonna University, Heidelberg College and Southwest Minnesota State University in Minnesota.  At Southwest Minnesota State he served as Chair of the Department of History, Director of the Regional History Center, Director of Rural Studies and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs.  He has also been the Special Assistant to the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and NEH’s liaison to Ethnic and Community groups in the United States (1981-1982) and the Acting Director of the Immigration History Research Center of the University of Minnesota (1985-1986).  In addition, he served as Director (1989-1991) of a two year NEH funded Institute to create materials on local history for inclusion in elementary and secondary school curricula.  The results of that Institute, titled The Heritage of the Prairie (1994) have been published under his editorship.  He was named Professor Emeritus of History at Southwest Minnesota State University in 1997.   

Dr. Radzilowski has written extensively on the history of Russia and East Central Europe and migration from East Central Europe with special emphasis on social history and historiography. A particular focus of his work has been the history of Polonia and its formation. He has published more than 100 monographs, edited collections, journal articles, book chapters and scholarly papers. His work on Eastern Europe has included articles on the ethnic and national groups in the region including a four-part series on the Jewish experience in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and modern Poland. His monographs include Feudalism, Revolution and the Meaning of Russian History (1994) The Polish Presence in Detroit (2001).

  Dr Radzilowski has written, produced and consulted on a number of radio and television productions and films including two award winning PBS films Out of Solidarity: Three Polish Families in America (1986) and Dealers among Dealers (1995) with Gaylen Ross.  The first was on the adaptation of Solidarity exiles to American life and the second dealt with the different Jewish cultures of New York’s Diamond District.  He also served as Historical Advisor to the A&E Reports program on the A&E Cable network. Dr. Radzilowski is a member of the editorial Board of the Polish Review and has been a consultant for the Department of Education in the State of New Jersey and a number of municipalities and school districts in Minnesota on ethnicity and pluralism. He has also served as an advisor and consultant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Dr. Radzilowski has lectured widely in Europe, Canada and the United States.  In 1991 and 1992 he co-directed a special program on International Business and the new situation in East Central and Central Europe at the Wirtschaft Universitet in Vienna for the Minnesota State University System.  He also chaired an International Conference on Migration at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland in 1986. After 1990, Dr. Radzilowski consulted with a number of American companies including Cummings Diesel-Europe, on doing business in East and East Central Europe in the post-Comminist era.

Adam Makowicz
Recital

As a youngster learning classical piano in mid-fifties Poland, when jazz was barely tolerated by the regime, Adam Makowicz discovered jazz on Willis Conover’s Voice of America broadcasts. It did not take long for jazz to discover Adam Makowicz: by 1977 he could be heard on 26 albums, had performed on three continents, and been voted Number One Jazz Pianist of Europe by readers of the international periodical, Jazz Forum. In that year the legendary talent scout and producer John Hammond brought Makowicz to the mecca  of jazz musicians, New York City. He arranged a ten-week engagement at the famous jazz club, The Cookery, in Greenwich Village, a solo album called Adam on the CBS – Columbia label, and a solo performance at Carnegie Hall on the same bill with jazz icons Earl “Fatha” Hines, George Shearing, and Teddy Wilson. Appearing in such august company, says Adam, “I was scared to death!”
Since then he has been a major attraction at jazz festivals all over the world; was guest solist with such orchestras as the National Symphony of Washington, the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, and the Warsaw Philharmonic; and has expanded his discography to 50 albums, with 34 of them under his own name. These include CD’s individually dedicated to such beloved American composers as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and, in recent release, Duke Ellington. Now in addition to his brilliant improvisations on the popular classics, Makowicz occasionally performs his own compositions.   

On one of his recent albums, Reflections on Chopin, Makowicz brings his extraordinary technical virtuosity to bear upon his own musical roots, presenting Chopin in a jazz idiom, as he did on the 150^th anniversary of Chopin’s death when invited to perform at the French Embassy in Washington, DC. It is the only disc of its kind in America, and underscores his interest in building bridges between classical music and jazz.

Since 1989, Adam Makowicz has returned to his homeland every year, popularizing the music of American composers both in solo recitals and with the country’s finest symphony orchestras. His performances in packed halls have included Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, as well as a Rhapsody in Blue that features his own extended cadenza. Makowicz’s many honors and awards have included the Officer’s Cross of Merit of the republic of Poland.

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December 2nd, 2005

October 30th, 2005

GEORGE WEIGEL
"John Paul II and the World’s Debt to Poland"
George Weigel, former President and now Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Roman Catholic theologian and one of the world's leading commentators on religion and public life. He has been writing about the Pope since the first days of the pontificate of John Paul II.
 George Weigel is also the author or editor of fourteen books on theology, politics, and culture. Among them is his book, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, in which he argued that the Polish Pontiff, not Reagan nor Gorbachev, played the crucial role in the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
 Upon reading that book the Pope personally asked Mr. Weigel to write a biography "from inside," as he was not satisfied with the ones that were available up to that point.
 The result was Witness to Hope, the international bestseller and definitive biography of Pope John Paul II.  It has been translated into over a dozen languages and was recently updated to include the last moments of the Polish Pontiff's legacy.
This lecture was organized  in cooperation with the University of Washington History and Slavic Departments and REECAS. 

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October 14th, 2005

Professor Kazimierz Braun
"American and Polish Theatre: Similarities,
 Differences, and Mutual Influences"
Kazimierz Braun presently professor of Theatre at SUNY University at Buffalo, is author of nearly 20 scholarly books, including the indispensable A History of Polish Theater, 1939-1989: Spheres of Captivity and Freedom (Greenwood Press, 1996), A Concise History of Polish Theater from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Centuries (Mellen Press, 2003) and A Concise History of American Theater (Krótka historia teatru amerykańskiego) published by Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. A. Mickiewicza, Poznań, 2005). Moreover, he is the subject of Horizons of Theater: Essays on the Creative Work of Kazimierz Braun (Wydawnictwo A. Marszałek, Toruń, 2004). He is also an accomplished playwright, poet, essayist, and novelist.
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lectures sponsored by our committee in 2004-2005

May 1st, 2005

Adam Zagajewski and Edward Hirsch

" Czesław Miłosz and the Future of Poetry"
During the lecture, the two outstanding poets captured their audience by reciting their own and Miłosz’s poetry, talking about their artistic journeys, and displaying irresistible charisma.
Adam Zagajewski, a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston, is a leading Polish poet of his generation and a recipient of the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Edward Hirsch, an acclaimed American poet, is the current president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

April 1^st, 2005

Lynne Olson And Stanley Cloud

 Question of Honor-The Kosciuszko Squadron:
Forgotten Heroes of World War II

Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud presented their fascination book about the legendary Polish fighter squadron: Question of Honor - The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II.  The lecture had a touching moment when Mr. Aleksander Herbst, a real hero of Squadron 303 and 308, was introduced.  The lecture was complemented by an interesting exhibition entitled Polish Wings in WWII.

To learn more about the book, visit its home page. 

February 4th, 2004

Professor Bozena Shallcross

”Negotiating the Gaze:
Olga Boznanska as A Portraitist "


Professor Bozena Shallcross gave a fascinating lecture about the work of the Polish 19th century postimpressionist painter Olga Boznanska.  “Negotiating the Gaze: Olga Boznanska as a Portraitist” was enthusiastically received and brought about many fascinating discussions.

Bożena Shallcross is an associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at The University of Chicago. 
 

October 3rd, 2003

Professor Marek Chodakiewicz

"The Warsaw Uprising 1944: Perception and Reality

The lecture by Prof. Marek Chodakiewicz, a research professor of history at the Institute of World Politics in Washington D.C., was devoted to the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis during World War II.  Prof. Chodakiewicz was a historical consultant for the CNN documentary on the Warsaw Uprising that aired in June 2004.  In Seattle, he gave an audience a captivating account of events and fascinating supporting facts about the Uprising.

lectures sponsored by our committee in 2003-2004 academic year

December 5th, 2003

AGNIESZKA HOLLAND
"Curiosity and Cinema"

AGNIESZKA HOLLAND (b.1948 in Warsaw) ranks as one of Poland's most prominent filmmakers and contributors to the Polish New Wave cinema. Following her graduation from the Prague Film School in 1971, Holland served as Krzysztof Zanussi's assistant director during his filming of Iluminacja. She also worked with Andrzej Wajda who served as her mentor, and the two collaborated on a number of scripts. Soon, she moved on to work independently as a director of stage plays and TV movies, later drawing upon her theatrical experience to create her 1978 feature Provincial Actors. The film won the FIPRESCI prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. Just before Poland declared martial law in December 1981, Holland moved to Paris. Her 1985 feature film Angry Harvest was nominated for an Academy award for Best Foreign Language Film. Six years later, in 1991, Holland earned a Golden Globe, for Europa, Europa. Holland followed it up with Olivier, Olivier (1992), which was not as well received. Her beautifully photographed version of The Secret Garden (1993) -- one of the director's numerous Hollywood productions – was very well received by the public as well as by the critics, as was her 1997 adaptation of Washington Square. The most recent films by Agnieszka Holland are The Third Miracle (1999), Julie Walking Home (2002), and A Little Princess (2003). In addition to directing, Holland occasionally works on screenplays. Some of her most notable work has been on Wajda's Danton (1982), Zanussi’s Without Anesthesia, and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue (Three Colors Trilogy, 1993).

October 18th, 2003

POLISH AVANT-GARDE FILM BEFORE 1945

The Polish Cultural Institute and Pacific Film Archive of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum developed a collection entitled “Polish Avant-Garde Film before 1945.” The program presented eight rare Polish short films that had never before been seen in the United States.

lectures sponsored by our committee in 2002-2003 academic year

May 16^th, 2003

RAFAŁ OLBIŃSKI
"Total Art"

RAFAŁ OLBIŃSKI (b.1946 in Kielce, Poland) is an illustrator, painter, graphic and stage designer. Educated in Poland, Mr. Olbinski has for the last 15 years been associated with the famous School of Visual Art in New York. His surrealist illustrations have graced the pages of Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Der Spiegel. Opera fans will recognize posters that he has created for opera houses around the world. According to art critic Matthew Gurwitsch, “He has shown an uncanny knack for capturing the essence of works by Mozart or Verdi or Janacek with the same startling precision that moves his covers off the newsstands.”

March 7th, 2003

ALEKSANDER WOLSZCZAN
"In the Search for the Second Earth "

ALEKSANDER WOLSZCZAN (b.1945) graduated from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland (1969), and then earned a Ph.D. in physics there in 1975. In the early 1980s he began his collaboration with the astronomical research centers at Princeton and Cornell. Since 1992 he has been a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University and lecturer at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Prof. Wolszczan is a radio astronomer and astrophysicist, one of the foremost researchers of pulsars, widely recognized for his discovery of the first planets outside the solar system. Timing the radio signals coming from a distant pulsar in the constellation Virgo, he determined the presence of three planets orbiting the star, two of them similar in mass to Earth, and the third about the mass of the moon. His discovery, published in the early 1990s, caused great excitement and was immediately followed by intense and successful search for planets around other stars.

February 14th, 2003

 BOGDAN CZAYKOWSKI
"Czesław Miłosz and the So-called Polish School of Poetry"

BOGDAN CZAYKOWSKI is a historian, literary critic, poet, and translator. He is a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he began his career in 1962, specializing in Polish and East European literature and history. His academic interests as a historian seem to have been shaped by the meanders of his early life. He was born in 1932 on the eastern outskirts of Poland. Deported with his family in 1940 to the Soviet labor camps, he subsequently made his way through Iran and India to postwar Great Britain. Later, he studied modern history in Dublin and Polish and East European literatures in London. In the early sixties he became the editor-in-chief of the Polish émigré periodical Continents. His collected poems, Wiatr z innej strony, were published in 1990; his more recent poetry volume, Okanagańskie sady, appeared in 1998. Professor Czaykowski’s academic work includes critical studies of prominent Polish nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets such as Mickiewicz, Norwid, Leśmian, and Miłosz. Last year he published the masterfully edited Anthology of Polish Poetry Abroad, 1939–1999.

October 25th, 2002

WITOLD SULIMIRSKI
“The Future Is Not What It Was: Realities of the Economic Transformation of Poland”

WITOLD SULIMIRSKI, a native of Poland and a graduate of Cambridge University, came to the United States in 1957 where he pursued an international banking career. He retired early in 1989 as Executive Vice President of Irving Trust Company/Bank of New York. The same year Mr. Sulimirski obtained the first license for a bank to be opened in Poland with foreign capital, and served as chairman of its supervisory board. From 1992 to 1994 at the behest of the White House, he headed the American Investment Initiative in Poland. Later on he was involved in many banking ventures and in the privatization program in Poland. Mr. Sulimirski has an extraordinary record of public service. Since 1980, he has been a trustee and is currently chairman of the Kościuszko Foundation, which for the past 77 years has promoted educational and cultural exchanges between the United States and Poland. He has also served as a board member or an officer of many organizations serving Polish-American causes.

November 13th, 2002

EVA HOFFMAN
"Conflicting Memories, Contested Past: Some Reflections on Polish-Jewish Relations"

EVA HOFFMAN was born in Krakow, Poland, where she received her early schooling and musical education before emigrating to Canada with her family in 1959. After receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard University, she taught literature and settled in New York City. While working as the editor of The New York Times Book Review, her first critically acclaimed book, Lost in Translation (E.P. Dutton, 1989) was published. Her intricate descriptions of the intellectual and emotional disruptions accompanying immigration into not only a new world, but also one that is expressed in a new language, won her a Whiting Award for writing. Hoffman's ties to her Polish homeland show even more strongly in her most recent book, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997), which delves into the complicated relations between Poles and Jews from the 16th to the 20th century. Hoffman is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters.

October 4th, 2002

WITOLD RYBCZYŃSKI
"The Perfect House of Andrea Palladio"

WITOLD RYBCZYŃSKI, of Polish parentage, was born in Edinburgh (1943), raised in Surrey, and attended Jesuit schools in England and Canada. He received Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Architecture degrees from McGill University in Montreal, where he taught between 1974 and 1993. His architectural experience has included working for Moshe Safdie on Habitat, and designing and building houses as a registered architect. For twenty years he was involved in housing research in Canada and abroad, for which he received a 1991 Progressive Architecture Award. In 1993, he received the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Since 1996 Witold Rybczynski has been a Professor of Urbanism at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

April 6th, 2002

TOM PODL
“Colors of Identity: Discovering My Roots Through Polish Art”

TOM PODL was born in 1938 in Chicago to Polish parents who came to the United States at the beginning of the century and whose families permanently settled in the Chicago area.  Mr. Podl graduated with a BSEE degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1963. He then moved to Minneapolis beginning a technical/sales career that led to establishment of Intralife, Inc. (a medical implant distributor) in Bellevue, WA in 1976. Mr. Podl is a collector of Polish art whose main interest lies in the 19th and 20th century Polish paintings and drawings. Over the past twenty years his collection has grown into the largest and most important collection of Polish paintings owned by an American. His collection is of such an importance and interest that, in collaboration with the National Museum in Kraków it was presented in the Polish cities of Kraków, Wroclaw, Warsaw, Sopot, Legnica, Poznan, Szczecin, Lodz as well as Rappersville, Switzerland. An exhibition tour of North America is currently being organized.
Mr. Podl is a director of the Society for Arts and former president of the Polish Museum of America in Chicago.